Cagle World

Oh how sweet it would be to live the life of an expat, perhaps to ride one’s bike to a beach in Portugal, or to commune with the monkeys in the forests of Costa Rica, or to chill with the tulips in the Netherlands, or to wait out the rain in the pubs of Ireland…to live 24/7 virtually anywhere else but here in the belly of the beast.

Last June, when Joe Biden stood on the debate stage with his mouth hanging ajar like an assisted living elder, too frail to fight the bellowing evil lummox, I began my column this way: “Canada is too cold, New Zealand is too far, Portugal is too small.”

I was serious.

And in November, when 49.8 percent of the electorate – the feckless, the oblivious, and the ignorant – voted to implode the American experiment, I joined the hordes of Google searchers who sought information on how to get the hell out. There’s a hot new website called Expatsi that dispenses expat advice, and since the election more than 50,000 disgusted Americans have signed up. Indeed, a Monmouth University pre-election poll says that “One-third (34 percent) of Americans would like to go and settle in another country if they were free to do so.”

I totally get it. I personally have no interest in sharing oxygen with the MAGA pod people. They look normal, but heaven help us. They’ve opened the gates for predatory freaks like Bobby Jr. They walk among us, not caring a whit about what the convicted criminal has wrought in just one wretched week. If I want to see “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” I’ll stream the film. I sure as hell don’t want to live it.

Not long ago, NBC News interviewed a North Carolina woman, Bianca Lynch, who had decamped with her family for reasons that make total sense to me: “It’s very very hard for us to see ourselves being in this country, having to be around so many people who felt (about Trump) that, ‘This is someone who needs to be in power’…I can’t change an entire country. I can simply move myself somewhere else and default to be happier.”

True that. I lived overseas for three years in the early ‘90s and it was sheer joy to escape America’s grotesqueries (guns, Newt Gingrich, theocrats). I truly would leave again, right now, in a heartbeat…um…if not for a wee list of…um…complicating factors:

My grandchildren.

My gainful employment.

My comfy condo.

My social network.

Oh well. Such are the ties that bind. I suspect that similar factors inhibit millions of expat dreamers. My ancestors came to this country circa 1900 and laid the foundation for the kind of life I’ve been lucky to build, and it ain’t easy to give up all the everyday goodies like the 5,000 varieties of cereal reportedly on shelves and online.

Besides, it’s not easy to be a refugee. I felt like an alien even in London, my home for three years, despite the vaunted “special relationship.” The Brits were condescending – when I tried to introduce myself to a neighbor, he lowered his eyes and introduced me to his dogs – and, now that I think of it, they never cleaned up after their dogs. The sidewalks in tony St. John’s Wood were, dare I say, an obstacle course. And the Brit bureaucracy? Don’t get me started.

The thing is, I could pack up and go somewhere, having filled out all the forms, but America would follow me anyway. Our culture spreads everywhere, like a kudzu plant. If I were bicycling in the Netherlands and paused to open my phone, the first news alert would surely be the latest imbecilities bellowed by the MAGA wildebeest. And I’d probably be trying for the umpteenth time to unsubscribe to the emails I get from Tim Walz,whoever he is.

So I guess I’ll stay put. We all have our ways to cope. One political columnist I know wrote this a few days ago: “As a hailstorm of executive orders began raining down on America, I literally thought, what can I do to escape this? The answer that came to me was very strange: Go clean out your spice rack. So I did. And discovered that, judging from the sell-by date on a rusted tin of red pepper, I hadn’t done a ruthless spice-rack purge since 1984…It was cleansing, I admit. It felt good. For about fifteen minutes.”

Not good enough. Dreaming of the great escape is forever.

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Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

There I was the other day, happily minding my own business, re-watching an old “Seinfeld” episode (Jerry and his gal were making out during “Schindler’s List”), when I received an email inviting me to opine on a radio show about Day One of the new autocratic regime.

Sigh. With a heavy heart I said OK. I felt like Michael Corleone in “Godfather III”: “Just when I thought I was out – they pull me back in.”

What propelled me to leave my cocoon last week was the convicted criminal’s predictable decision to free the convicted criminals who’d stormed the Capitol – the first blatant manifestation of the lawlessness that will define his regime. This action was too revolting for me to ignore; and now we’ve learned, via a Trump adviser’s leak to the Axios news site, that Trump made his decision in this sagacious fashion: “F— it. Release ‘em all.”

Here’s what I said on WHYY (Philadelphia’s NPR outlet), during its “Studio Two” show:

“Today is the 75th anniversary of the death of George Orwell. I think George Orwell would’ve (denounced) pardoning people who directly attacked the peaceful transfer of power and a free and fair election…The message it sends is, ‘you can beat up on police officers, on federal property at the U.S. Capitol – and it’s OK if you are supporters of President Trump.’ It’s a baldly partisan message, and, if I’m not mistaken, polls show that most Americans (oppose) pardoning people from Jan. 6. Because we saw what happened with our own eyes…and are we supposed to deny what we saw? It’s a powerfully disturbing message which says, ‘If we lose an election, it’s OK to storm the Capitol.”

I was not mistaken about public opinion. A new Reuters-Ipsos survey says that 58 percent of Americans (including 1 in 3 Republicans) oppose the blanket pardons, and two other polls have similar numbers. The Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest law enforcement union, have also condemned the pardons: “When perpetrators of crimes, especially serious crimes, are not held fully accountable, it sends a dangerous message that the consequences for attacking law enforcement are not severe, potentially emboldening other to commit similar acts of violence.”

Indeed, my on-air comments did not go far enough. I should have stated a truth which is self-evident: By freeing his loons and goons to prey on what remains of civilized society, Trump has created – or, to be more precise, he has recreated – a street army of domestic terrorists who have future license to engage in violence on his behalf. Starting with the former leader of the Proud Boys who was set to serve a 22-year sentence, and the founder of the Oath Keepers who was supposed to do 18.

Even the right-wing editorial board of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal clanged the alarm: “Law and order? Back the blue?…What happened (on Jan. 6) is a stain on Mr. Trump’s legacy. By setting free the cop beaters, the President adds another.” (The Journal editorial writers spent the election season assailing Kamala Harris. The Fraternal Order of Police officially opposed her. Were they all deaf and dumb about Trump’s plan to pardon his Visigoths?)

Not that he cares a whit about the criticism he receives. Granted, he gets mad and posts stupid missives on social media (yesterday he attacked the Episcopal bishop who’d pleaded with him “to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared”), but he’s not going to be moved by public opinion to trim his extremism. The blanket pardons are Exhibit A. His popular-vote margin last November was one of the smallest in history, but he’s falsely claiming a “mandate” anyway and he’ll behave as if it’s real.

As if any of this should be a surprise.

Ankush Khardori, a former Justice Department prosecutor, insists that Trump will likely pay a price for freeing his fellow criminals: “Trump is at the start of his second term, but it’s his last one; the Republicans have a razor-thin majority in the House; and the 2026 midterms will be here before we know it. Real risks exist for the GOP both now and in the future.”

To which I say: Does this person live in America?

That’s enough from me; I’m fleeing back to “Seinfeld.” But alas, necking during “Schindler’s List “doesn’t seem as funny as it did the other day. Totalitarianism is deadly serious business.

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Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

I’ve been writing political opinion nonstop for 20 years. As of today I’m done.

Life was different when the Philadelphia Inquirer gifted me a column in January 2004. Both major parties believed in the rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power, and traditional democratic values. It was beyond unthinkable that either side would condone a plotted coup and morph into a criminal cult.

We opinion journalists are not so naive as to believe what we write can change the world. But we generally do hope what we write can perhaps make the world just a wee bit better on any given day by offering some grist for those who have the capacity to think. This was true of the America I loved in my younger life, but I no longer recognize the America we’re stuck with. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I recognize it all too well – and that, having reached that conclusion, I’ve hit the wall on how to write about it. In the quality time I have left, I won’t expend precious brain cells inveighing in vain about the MAGA dark age.

Hence my personal decision to shift gears.

Early next year, for those who care, I’ll resurface on Substack, the online home for writers. My “newsletter” (Substack lingo) will be light on politics and heavy on other interests: books, movies, baseball, Boomer music, streaming TV, trips, memories, whatever strikes my fancy. I don’t assume there will be many readers (who cares what I think about some Netflix show?), but tapping a keyboard is in my DNA. To tweak a line from the French philosopher Rene Descartes, I write therefore I am.

Roughly 75 million of us are wrestling with how to recalibrate and soldier on, how to attain and sustain equilibrium in a land turned upside down, a land that has left us, in the words of St. Paul the Apostle, “at the mercy of all the tricks men play and their cleverness in deceit.”

I’m busy grieving the loss of the all-American verities I once took for granted. I was raised to believe that the rule of law was good. That criminality was bad. That decency was good. That racism was bad. That empathy was good. That misogyny was bad. That veracity was good. That education was good and ignorance was bad. That telling the truth was good and serial lying was bad.

But clearly I’m out of sync with the times. The will of the people – don’t get me started about those people – have flipped the script and told us who we really are.

Many factors have brought us to this pitiable abyss, but what concerns me most is the epidemic of ignorance. Half the electorate (the winning half) rejects factual reality; an October poll, conducted by Ipsos, said that “Americans who have correct information on current political issues” strongly favored Kamala Harris; the ill-informed, stoked by the metastasizing MAGA “media,” strongly favored Trump. That’s how it works in Hungary, where Viktor Orban has dismantled democracy by building his own disinformation domain.

Predictability is the death of creativity. I should know. My standard column, these last nine years, has started with a lament (Look what Trump is saying/doing!) and ended with a warning (If voters don’t wake up, things will get worse!). Writing about Trump is an enervating exercise, like circling a cul de sac with no avenue of escape. It deadens the mind and sucks out the soul.

My colleagues in the commentariat are doing their best right now – spotlighting Trump’s new roster of freaks and pervs, the “crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence is the best guarantee of their loyalty” (Hannah Arendt’s description of totalitarian toadies) – and I’ll likely read them with interest. I surely don’t envy their task.

The high purpose of political journalism is to speak truth to power, but half the electorate has sanctioned oligarchical power. Truth is now is just another “narrative” competing in vain for the attention of the inattentive.

This dispatch from a seasoned journalist says it all: “Often in a home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard or read. Sometimes (I) was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions (I) was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts had become what (their leader), with cynical disregard for the truth, said they were.”

Sound familiar? That was American correspondent William Shirer, reporting from Germany during the 1930s. Anyone who’s still in denial about what awaits us should be indicted for failure of imagination.

So I’m bailing until I reboot. Steely Dan sang, “When Black Friday comes / I’m gonna dig myself a hole / Gonna lay down in it ’til I satisfy my soul.” Our Black Friday is now at hand. I need not add my wee voice to the plethora of opinion writers who are rightly seething anew over the latest Trumpist turns of the screw. Starting in January, my Substack newsletter will be titled “Subject to Change,” and, post by post, it certainly will. That’s how I hope to cope.

I suspect that you too are determined to navigate the coming storm by nurturing what makes you happy, what satisfies your soul. As the self-help guru Kamal Ravikant says, “Love yourself like your life depends on it.” I now join you in that quest.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

If only Abigail Adams could be here to stump for Kamala Harris.

Way back in March 1776, when husband John was serving in the Continental Congress and fueling the plot to declare independence, Abigail wrote him a letter: “In the new code of laws I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies… Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.”

So here we are, 248 years later, and it’s up to the ladies to take down a tyrant. They may well do it.

The nation’s gender chasm is obvious. More women than men turn out to vote (a truism in every presidential election since 1964), and Kamala Harris’ lead among female voters is bigger than Donald Trump’s lead among men. That alone should lift the spirits of fretful Democrats.

Plus we have the early-voting stats in seven battleground states, where women have cast 55 percent of the ballots. Granted, some of those women are surely pro-MAGA, but MAGA activist Charlie Kirk is clearly worried; on social media he warns: “If men stay at home, Kamala is president. It’s that simple.”

There are also the stunning numbers in reliably red Iowa. The Selzer Poll – which has long been the gold standard there, respected by both parties – reports that Harris now leads statewide by three points. According to the Des Moines Register, “The poll shows that women – particularly those who are older or who are politically independent – are driving the late shift toward Harris.” I question whether Harris can actually win Iowa, which has voted twice for Trump, but the fact that she has made it competitive – thanks to late-breaking women voters – should entice us to ask what that might portend in the seven swing states.

But to really gauge Kamala Harris’ potential upside, we need to look at white women – by far the largest cohort in the female electorate. In the Trump-Biden 2020 race, Trump won white women by 11 points (according to the exit polls). But, in last weekend’s ABC News-Ipsos poll, Trump was winning them by only 4 points, courtesy of white women without college degrees. White women with college degrees buried him in a landslide: 61 percent Harris, 38 percent him. And suburban women of all races were overwhelmingly for Harris, 59-40.

Does Harris have a problem with the majority of male voters? Yup. But women are often 53 percent of the voting electorate, they’re basically the ballgame, and Trump has no clue what to do. His long track record as a pig certainly hasn’t helped. His status as an adjudicated rapist hasn’t helped. His relentless attempts, as president, to end Obamacare hasn’t helped. His braggadocio about blowing up Roe v. Wade hasn’t helped. His decision to hang out with bro podcasters hasn’t helped. His patronizing promise to be the “protector” of women “whether the women like it or not” certainly hasn’t helped.

And at a rally in North Carolina over the weekend, he addressed his problem with women by singling out the ones he thought were hot: “There are some women that are very beautiful in the audience. I would never say that, because if I said like that, that, (pointing out women) her, her, her, her, her… If I said they were beautiful, that’s the end of my political career.”

The Harris camp suspects that millions of wives in patriarchal marriages are tempted to defy their MAGA husbands and exercise the right to choose a ballot. A new ad narrated by Julia Roberts seeks to woo those women, and the MAGAts are furious. Here’s the aforementioned Charlie Kirk: “I think it’s so nauseating where this wife is wearing the American hat, she’s coming in with her sweet husband who probably works his tail off to make sure that she can go, you know, and have a nice life and provide to the family, and then she lies to him saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m gonna vote for Trump,’ and then she votes for Kamala Harris as her little secret in the voting booth.”

The husband “works his tail off” to give the lady of leisure “a nice life”…Good grief. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 23 percent of contemporary households have just one working spouse. Women in this election can perform a public service by reminding MAGAts that the 1950s are over. And they can save us from a tyrant, that too would be nice.

Alexis de Tocqueville said it best in his seminal Democracy in America, in the patois of the 1830s: “If one asked me to what do I think one must principally attribute the singular prosperity and growing force of this people, I would answer that it is to the superiority of its women.”

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected].

Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden fascist festival was an orgasmic fun zone for the racists, misogynists, naifs, and dolts who gorged on the raw MAGA meat. But one noteworthy remark, uttered seemingly off the cuff by their Fuehrer, probably sailed over the heads.

While heaping praise on one of his puppets – House Speaker Mike Johnson, who had predictably trekked to New York to kiss butt – Trump played a little verbal peekaboo: “I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, right? Our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over.”

That’s not to be confused with The Beatles’ “Do You Want to Know a Secret?”

No, Trump was referencing one of the facets of his fascist game plan.

If he loses the race to Kamala Harris, which is quite a distinct possibility, Plan B is to seize control anyway. His bright idea is to create sufficient chaos in a sufficient number of lost swing states – by preventing certification of Harris’ win, by sowing doubts about the vote tallies via disinformation, by doing whatever it takes – thereby throwing the election to the House of Representatives. Where a Republican majority led by Mike Johnson would rig the deal for Trump on House certification day – Jan. 6, 2025.

Rest assured, if Trump can’t win in November, he’ll try for a coup in January. Sound familiar? Because it’s a well-established fact that fascists believe in the sanctity of elections only if they win, and that rigging elections to ensure victory is de rigueur. This particular fascist need only model the electoral behavior of his alpha dog in Moscow.

And Johnson, with God allegedly at his side, is jonesing to help. Back when he was a back-bencher in 2020, he echoed Trump’s baseless “fraud” claims. This time around,Johnson has refused to unequivocally state that he will accept the 2024 results if Trump loses. And he says we already have “fraud” in 2024 because lots of undocumented immigrants are supposedly casting ballots.

Earlier this year Johnson went on TV to float that lie. When he was asked to provide factual evidence, he made a fool of himself: “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not easily provable. We don’t have that number.”

What we really do know, more than “intuitively,” is that unless Harris wins this election in a landslide, the fascist will yank Johnson’s strings in January. And the puppet would be fine with that. After Trump uttered his “little secret” remark at the MSG rally, Johnson released a statement: “By definition, a secret is not to be shared – and I don’t intend to share this one.”

But this best laid plan could go astray, for one big reason.

The Jan. 6 certification will be conducted by the new House of Representatives, which is seated on Jan. 3. The new House members will have been elected in November. And the new House may well feature a Democratic majority. For Trump, that would be game over.

In other words, for all the attention being paid to Harris-Trump, the House races are hugely important. Republicans have an exceedingly thin majority – 220 seats to the Democrats’ 212 (with three vacancies, two of which are in safe blue districts) – and it won’t take a blue wave to turn the chamber. Indeed, five vulnerable Republicans are clinging to suburban swing districts in New York alone. With only a week left on the electoral clock, donors with money still in their pockets would be wise to focus on the House.

But even if the Dems take back the House in November, Johnson could conceivably make mischief anyway – by, among other things, refusing to swear in new blue House members on Jan. 3, thus refusing to cede the speakership. As Liz Cheney said on “Meet the Press” a few weeks ago, “I do not have faith that Mike Johnson will fulfill his constitutional obligations.”

So buckle up, folks. Although – tongue in cheek – there’s actually an easy way to thwart the fascists this time. Joe Biden will still be president when the next Jan. 6 arrives. If the MAGAts try to overthrow a Harris victory, Biden can simply order the roundup of all the conspirators who are threatening our democracy. That would be an “official act” as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court, remember?

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

It was funny when loony laughingstock Donald Trump serenaded his cultists with a story about Arnold Palmer’s penis, the latest reason medical experts are questioning his mental fitness. Indeed, “behavioral disinhibition,” as evidenced in his Palmer penis riff, is a dire symptom of mental ill health. We don’t know anything for sure because his handlers refuse to release his medical records. But here’s what we do know for sure:

A vote for Trump is a vote for J.D. Vance and his Project 2025 apparatchiks.

Remember last winter, when Nikki Haley campaigned in the Republican primaries with her message that if old Joe Biden were re-elected, he’d likely die in office and hand the presidency to Kamala Harris? Seems like a million years ago. But now we’re just 15 days short of judgment day, and Harris can ill afford to mince words. She’s already questioning Trump’s mental and physical fitness; she should expand on that by hammering home a version of Haley’s message:

Trump could be too sick to serve or he could drop dead – thus handing the reins of power to a far younger zealot who’d more effectively impose the agenda crafted by Project 2025.

David Frum, one of our blessedly sane conservatives, tweeted the obvious: “Trump is obviously sick and getting sicker…If elected, real power will shift from (him)…The most interesting question about a second Trump term is how rapidly and totally a Vice President Vance and his cabal of billionaire backers will be able to wrest power from the elderly and ailing Trump.”

That could happen via the invocation of the 25th Amendment. Veteran political analyst Norm Ornstein (now retired from the conservative American Enterprise Institute), said the other day: “The public must be reminded that while the vice president is the only member of the Executive Branch who can’t be fired, the president can essentially be fired by the vice president should he become significantly impaired. This is accomplished through the 25th Amendment. People must realize that a vote for Trump could easily be a vote for a President Vance.”

At this point, the MAGA campaign team is just trying to drag the deteriorating Trojan Horse across the finish line – which may happen, thanks to the usual coalition of the feckless, the reckless, the oblivious, the racist, the misogynist, and the willfully ignorant. Say goodbye to our democratic values if we wind up under the heel of a fake hillbilly who embraces the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen,” who stokes hateful lies about legal immigrants, who supports a national abortion ban (despite his lying denials).

But it’s worse than that. Vance is tight with Kevin Roberts, the right-wing Heritage Foundation leader and chief architect of Project 2025. He also wrote the foreword for Roberts’ new book. A few key sentences: “Roberts is articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics…We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

I half-believe Trump when he professes ignorance about Project 2025 (“I have no idea who is behind it…I don’t know anything about it”), but his level of awareness is irrelevant. He’s the front man for the forces waiting in the wings.

And he’d be just one Big Mac away from handing them power.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

In all likelihood, 99 percent of the Fox News faithful who saw Kamala Harris Wednesday night came away convinced anew she’s awful. But her decision to visit the notorious propaganda outlet had very little downside. If she managed to sway a percent or two, that could help her in a close election.

What she did demonstrate – for the small share of Fox viewers with open minds – is she is the precise opposite of how Trump routinely depicts her. He says she’s dumb, cognitively impaired, and incapable of stringing sentences together. Perhaps it shocked some viewers to discover none of those slurs are true. Perhaps some viewers will give her points for sitting in the lion’s den and showing she’s tough and articulate. Perhaps some female viewers noticed she refused to abide Bret Baier’s constant interruptions, the first of which came 20 seconds into the interview.

But the most galvanizing moment came late in the half hour, when Harris denounced Trump for railing the other day about unleashing the U.S. military against “the enemy within.” Baier was ready for that – or so he thought. He teed up a video clip that sought to whitewash Trump’s comments; earlier Wednesday, Trump had insisted, “I’m not threatening anybody.” That was the clip.

Well. What else could we expect from a fake news network that was compelled to shell out $787 million in a court settlement after it was outed for amplifying Trump’s relentless lies about the 2020 election?

It was no surprise that the clip Baier aired was deftly edited to omit all of Trump’s rants about the so-called enemies within – the “sick” and the “evil” and the “dangerous” and the “Marxists” and the “communists,” and “the Pelosis” (one of which was attacked by a hammer-wielding MAGAt). Harris promptly exposed that classic Fox trickery by slapping Baier silly:

“Bret, I’m sorry, and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about ‘the enemy within’ that he has repeated when he’s speaking about the American people. That’s not what you just showed. Here’s the bottom line, he has repeated that many times. You and I both know that he’s talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him.

“This is a democracy. And in a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it. And this is what is at stake, which is why you have someone like the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying what Mark Milley has said, about Donald Trump being a threat to the United States of America.”

Baier was facing the camera, so it was impossible to see the tire tracks on his back.

Another great moment was when Baier pointed out that roughly half the voters seem likely to support Trump, he asked Harris whether she thought they were “stupid.” That was an obvious Baier trap, inviting her to utter a basket-of-deplorables remark a la Hillary. But she was too smart to take that bait: “I would never say that about the American people!”

Are at least a small percentage of Fox viewers willing to abide a strong woman who refuses to kowtow? We’ll see about that. But her forthright fervor likely did her no harm – and it’ll arguably play better, in the social media clips, than Trump’s response Wednesday night, during a Florida event, to a question about whether he still thinks climate change is a hoax. He proceeded to talk about his Doral golf course:

“I get awards, environmental awards for the way I built it for the water, the way I use the water, the sand, the mixing of the sand and the water, I mean many different, but I’ve had many awards over the years for environmental, the way I’ve built because you know about building that’s what you do…The water is coming up an eighth of an inch over 300 years, the ocean is gonna rise and you know nobody knows if it’s true or not but they’re worried about the ocean rising an eighth of an inch or a quarter of an inch in 300 years.”

Harris was willing to do Fox News, so perhaps Trump would be willing to explain his climate change comment in a sitdown with MSNBC.

He’ll do it right after he releases his medical records.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

How sweet it is that Donald Trump’s crimes in the wake of his 2020 defeat are finally back in the headlines, just in time for the final sprint to the 2024 election.

Thank you, Jack Smith, for the recently-released court brief that meticulously details the federal case against Trump. And thank you, Liz Cheney, for crossing the aisle and warning voters that Trump’s “depraved cruelty” – putting his own vice president’s life in jeopardy on Jan. 6 – is proof that he “can never be trusted with power.” And thank you, Tim Walz, for those final minutes in the VP debate, exposing JD Vance as a election-denying MAGAt who hates democracy.

Trump has been rage-posting about Smith and Cheney (of course), and it’s easy to see why. He’s terrified of losing his campaign to stay out of jail, and the timing of Smith’s evidentiary brief could not be worse for him. Even though he’s horrifically stupid about substance, he instinctively understands media optics, so he knows it’s politically perilous to have the coup criminal case in the news between now and Nov. 5.

Granted, there’s a huge pool of potential voters who’ve inexplicably forgotten about the violent Capitol insurrection, and who don’t know or care about Trump’s relentless efforts to overthrow the free and fair election he lost – like plotting with various conspirators to scream “election fraud” where none existed, pressuring local authorities to “find” him votes that didn’t exist, trying to bully some key counties to stop tallying ballots, and ginning up slates of fake electors, and much more. For millions of feckless or oblivious voters, the developments will not matter a whit.

But with less than a month left on the clock, in a race that’s supposedly close, the chilling factoids in special counsel Smith’s court document could resonate with enough Trump-averse independents and Republicans to buttress Kamala Harris’ campaign in the home stretch.

In Bruce Springsteen’s endorsement of Harris, he said that our fight for a democratic future depends on “women and men with the national good guiding their hearts.” It’s those people, across the political spectrum, who might well heed the tidbits in Smith’s narrative. Especially these:

– On Jan. 6, after Trump personally tweeted his Capitol goons with the news that VP Mike Pence was refusing to play ball, the goons went ballistic and Pence (plus his family) had to be whisked to safety because his life was in danger. Trump, alone in his dining room, watched the violence on TV. When an aide informed Trump that Pence was imperiled, his answer was: “So what?”

– Trump told family members that “it doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.” (Translation: If you vote against a totalitarian, your vote doesn’t count. The totalitarian will say he won anyway.)

– When Trump’s lawyers told him that his baseless election fraud claims wouldn’t hold up in court, Trump ordered them to file lawsuits anyway. The fight was all that mattered; in his words, “The details don’t matter.” (Example: At one point Trump spread word that 36,000 non-citizens had voted in Arizona. Fuve days later, he upped the figure to “a few hundred thousand.” Then “40 or 50,000.” Then back to 36,000. All those numbers were illusions.)

– One Trump aide, who repeatedly told Trump that his loss was legit and that his election fraud claims were delusional, got so fed up that he emailed a colleague: “It’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.”

– Trump wanted Republican national chairwoman Ronna McDaniel to circulate a lie about (non-existent) election fraud in a key Michigan county, but McDaniel told Trump that even Michigan’s Republican House Speaker thought the claim was “fucking nuts.”

At the tail end of the VP debate, slick Trump supplicant JD Vance tried to dodge questions about the 2020 election aftermath, insisting that he’s focused on the future. Too bad his boss didn’t get that memo, because in Michigan last week, Trump focused yet again on the past. Referring to 2020 he said: “We won, we won, we did win.”

I doubt Trump knows who William Faulkner is, but he clearly hews to one Faulknerism: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

The bloody chaos he inspired in the wake of that election – for which he’s been indicted on four counts by a federal grand jury – is a harbinger of what’s to come unless Harris wins by the most decisive possible margin. If that were to happen, he might finally be held accountable in court for the havoc he has wreaked on our core democratic institutions.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

We all know vice presidential debates rarely move the public opinion needle.

In 2020 Donald Trump was thrown out of office by a record 81 million voters because he was Donald Trump, not because a fly took up residence on Mike Pence’s head. In 1988 the senior George Bush won 53.4 percent of the popular vote – we haven’t seen a percentage that high in all the years since – despite the fact that his understudy, Dan Quayle, was roundly mocked in the veep debate as a callow lightweight.

So it’s highly unlikely this week’s VP debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance will reshape the 2024 campaign. Vance’s goal was to sheath his claws, hide his MAGA zealotry, and ooze calculated compassion – whereas Walz’s goal was to soft-pedal his progressivism and stress bipartisanship. Vance never brought up his summertime lie that National Guardsman Walz chickened out of Iraq. And Walz never mentioned Vance’s “childless cat lady” weirdness.

Walz, in “Minnesota Nice” mode, never mentioned Vance’s “childless cat lady” weirdness and didn’t assail him for being a slick serial-lying extremist. That is until the debate clock was set to expire, when we got a moment that’s already become a viral sensation.

Four years ago, Vance refused to accept Joe Biden’s election victory. That made him fair game for a question from the moderators whether he would again seek to challenge this year’s election results, even if every governor certifies the results.

Vance’s instinct was to slip-slide away: “I think we’re focused on the future.” He never answered that crucial question. Instead, he claimed Trump called on supporters to “protest peacefully” on January 6th at the U.S.Capitol and “peacefully gave over power on January the 20th, as we have done for 250 years in this country.”

Trump “peacefully gave over power”? Need we bother to annotate Vance’s lies and diversionary drivel? Like the fact 62 judges, including Trump appointees, said there were not “problems” with the balloting. Like the fact Trump’s own cybersecurity chief and his own attorney general said the balloting was secure. Like the fact Trump goaded his thugs to attack the Capitol and then watched it on TV for hours while people died and more than 100 cops were beaten.

Joe Biden became president on Jan. 20th only because Trump’s violent putsch failed.

Over to you, Tim Walz: “January 6 (was) the first time in American history that a president or anyone tried to overturn a fair election and the peaceful transfer of power. And here we are four years later in the same boat…This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump’s inability to say – he is still saying – he didn’t lose the election.”

He then posed a simple question to Vance: “Did he lose the 2020 election?”

Vance: “Tim, I’m focused on the future.”

Walz: “That is a damning non-answer.”

Damning, predictable, and pathetic. Vance couldn’t muster a simple “Yes” because he is tethered to a fascist. And when you’re tethered to a fascist, you’ve got to stay in goose step.

Walz took that ball and ran with it: “I’m pretty shocked by this. (Trump) lost the election…When Mike Pence made that decision (on Jan. 6) to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage.”

Granted, many urgent issues were raised during the debate – with Vance lying at virtually every turn, like when he said that Trump “saved” Obamacare (as president, Trump repeatedly tried to kill it); like when he said that VP Kamala Harris hasn’t invested in clean energy jobs for American workers (Harris broke the 50-50 Senate tie to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which funds billions in clean energy jobs for American workers); like when he complained that our solar panels are manufactured in China (80 percent are manufactured here); like when he blamed “millions of illegal immigrants” for the housing shortage (this shortage has plagued us since the Great Recession); like when he insisted that he has never supported a national abortion ban (two years ago, these were his exact words: “I certainly would like to see abortion illegal nationally”).

All those issues are vitally important. But none are as existential, as fundamental to our democracy, as the willingness to abide by the results of an election.

Will Vance’s lies about 2020 and his refusal to answer the key question about 2024 (“Would you again seek to challenge this year’s election results?”) propel swing voters toward Harris and Walz? I doubt it will, if the history of veep debates is any guide. But it should.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Even before Hurricane Helene struck the Florida coast with Category 4 winds, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (better known as NOAA) and its subsidiaries – the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center – were already busy saving lives.

Local emergency officials, echoing NOAA’s dire forecasts, spurred mass evacuations on the Gulf Coast and warned of 20-foot storm surges that may not be “survivable.” The sudden strengthening of this hurricane, fed by Gulf waters made warmer by climate change, triggered, in NOAA’s words, “catastrophic, life-threatening inland flooding” that will likely extend all the way to the western mountains of North Carolina.

The federal agency says it’s just doing its job: “Climate, weather, and water affect all life on our ocean planet. NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict our changing environment, from the deep sea to outer space, and to manage and conserve America’s coastal and marine resources.”

Bravo to NOAA and all the other government weather organizations for all that they do… but wait! Way down on page 664 of Donald Trump’s Project 2025 – the fascist blueprint he falsely says he knows nothing about – we find this pithy paragraph:

“The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.” Because NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

My message to the undecided voters: You say you don’t know enough about Kamala Harris, but if you open your eyes and ears, you’ll realize you know more than enough about what Trump and his minions would do if restored to power. And with climate change wreaking increasing havoc with our weather, do you think it’s a bright idea to dismantle our national early-warning system?

My message to Floridians, in particular: Year after year, you’re experiencing the most dire consequences of climate change, and the worst is yet to come. The presidential election is a little over a month away. You’d be well advised to revisit your fealty to the MAGA movement and recognize how insanely stupid it would be to vote against your first priority, which is saving your own asses.

Indeed, just this week, the Miami Herald editorial page is speaking the truth about the reason Floridians should “staunchly oppose Project 2025:”

“In Florida, we live and die – sometimes literally – by what the National Hurricane Center and National Weather Service, which are parts of NOAA, tell us. For six whole months every year, from June to the end of November, we’re in the hurricane season… We cling to the utterances of the weather pros during these times of high stress, as we huddle in our homes or debate whether to flee an on-coming storm. We want – no, we need – forecasts that are free of hype, a profit motive and the taint of politics.”

Helene was rapidly supercharged by record-warm water. Climatologists say that the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico is exceptionally warm for this time of year – thanks to climate change, which comes to us courtesy of fossil fuel pollution. And by the way, Trump’s Project 2025 has a few things to say about climate change:

“The Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding…the perceived threat of climate change (is) a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public…Climate-change research should be disbanded.”

A new national poll says that, of all Americans who’ve heard of Project 2025, only four percent view it favorably. The big question is whether its stench will prove sufficiently malodorous to tilt this election toward sanity and spare us a Category 4 regime.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]